Four generations of Deloraine’s racing history

Sep 3

Gayle and Stephen Gerrard with recent Launceston winner, Little Miss Asha. Photo by Hayley Manning — Gayle and Stephen Gerrard with recent Launceston winner, Little Miss Asha.

*Photo by Hayley Manning*

By Sharon Webb

WHETHER YOU’RE talking horse or greyhound racing, it all started four generations ago in Fred Eade’s blacksmith shop in Emu Bay Road.

The blacksmith shop is still there today, complete with horseshoes and sundry metal bits. As you drive past Gayle Gerrard’s home next door to Deloraine House, you’d never guess the significance of her old shed in Deloraine’s racing history.

As Fred’s great grandson Stephen Gerrard tells it, Fred still shoed horses there into his 80s. Many of the wrought iron fences and gates around Deloraine were made there by Fred’s son, William (Cobber). Fred’s second son Graham, Stephen’s grandfather, drove Tasmania’s trains for 40 years.

‘Fred had trotters, and Graham and Cobber drove and trained trotters,’ Stephen said.

‘They raced in Carrick and Sheffield and at Elphin in the days before horse floats. They walked their horses to the races.’

The two sons’ mother, originally Lila Oliver from Beulah, was also a horsewoman with trotters, attending Deloraine’s famous thoroughbred Easter Races well into old age. She died 12 hours before her 107th birthday in 1991.

Train driver Graham Eade married Vonnie Kelly from Ulverstone and their daughter and Stephen’s mother, Gayle, carried on the racing interest when she married a trainer of gallopers, Mal Gerrard.

‘Mal came from NSW and was originally a jockey,’ said former Deloraine Rotary president Gayle.

‘We met after he rode in the Easter Races in Deloraine, at an Easter Monday dance at Red Hills.’

The rest is history as they say. Mal retired as a jockey and moved to Deloraine to train thoroughbreds in the stables near the football ground – with great success, according to Stephen.

‘Robin’s Boy was Dad’s first good horse. He won the Queen’s Cup in 1968 and named the stables Robins Lodge after that win. Those stables floated down the river after a big flood and were rebuilt.

‘Dad was the best of the best and his horses won every big race in Tasmania except the Hobart Cup.

‘Win the Trick owned by local Geoff Atkins won the Devonport Cup in 1969, Red Tornado won the Launceston Cup in 1970 and Ebon Beat won Easter Monday’s Grand National Steeple Chase in 1972 at Deloraine.

‘After a race win in 1970, Dad met Queen Elizabeth at Mowbray. He said they spoke for a long time about horses.’

Well-known Deloraine trainer Terry Roles learned from Mal Gerrard when he was young and Stephen grew up around horses with his dad and Terry.

One of Tasmania’s current three top trainers, Barry Campbell, also began with Mal Gerrard.

The Deloraine Races were the big event of the year, said Stephen. Racegoers dressed up to the nines, queued up back to the Deloraine Police Station to get in the racecourse gates.

And those gates are significant in the Gerrard family because they were made by ‘Uncle Cobber’.

Family matriarch Lila Eade wouldn’t miss the races, last attending on the day before her 100th birthday in 1984.

These days the Easter steeplechases are no more because the Deloraine track doesn’t meet occupational health and safety requirements.

According to The Examiner racing writer Greg Mansfield, its closure meant that one of Tasmania's great sporting traditions was lost.

In 2006, the meeting moved to Longford and since then the Deloraine Cup has been run at Spreyton.

After Terry Roles gave up horse training, Stephen’s interest moved to greyhounds.

He wonders whether his daughter, Olivia, now in the Navy in Sydney or his Devonport based son Luke, will carry on the family racing passion for the next generation.

Will they look at the shed that was Deloraine’s blacksmithing hub, examine the grooves of the horse brands in its door, and know their children could next be a part of Deloraine’s racing history?